The longest midnight
by JavierCervantes
Summary: Sagacia finds herself maneuvered into solving a series of bizarre ritual murders that may have something to do with the Wizarding world. Based on my HPAU (there's differences).
1. One more dance

The storm over Toulouse was worsening. Blue and purple hued lightening split the sky in a symphony of thunder. Sagacia looked out of the window of Le Café des Artistes towards Le Pont Neuf that loomed over the rising Garonne river and flipped up the collar of her threadbare brown oilskin duster. She hated the rain, and the cold.

"People shouldn't die at a time like this, " she said taking a deep breath as she stepped out into the downpour. The nearest metro stop was Esquirol, she couldn't risk apparating in this storm, besides she would need the _will_. Regardless, with all the ambient electricity bouncing around even she might splinch. From there she could make it to the stop just outside the Lycée des Arènes.

Sagacia was beginning to hate this arrangement. She didn't like _flics_ as a general rule, she disliked them even more than the average muggles. But Fleur was her god-daughter as Sagacia had gone to school with her mother Apolline. They had been best friends at Beauxbatons and she had begged Sagacia to help Renault Delacour just this once. Sagacia didn't like muggles knowing too much about _la sorcellerie_, much less that she was _une sorcière._

The rain came down in near horizontal sheets. This was going to be a long day.

"What do I care if someone killed a bunch of muggles, " she said aloud as she shook her head from side to side and climbed down the steps to the metro stop.

It was another short walk in the rain, from the stop Arènes to the Lycée.

A few portly gendarmes were standing guard at the entrance. She walked right past them and through the entrance. The slamming of the front doors caught their attention and they stared at it _bewildered_. She didn't want to be seen, and she didn't want to spend 10 minutes arguing with them that she was invited to be there, and have them have to call the person in charge and more talking. Muggles. Lots of talking.

Another murder. A mass murder.

Sagacia looked around the massive entrance hall, to the lonely plain clothes man standing in the center, she cleared her throat.

"Es-tu Sagacia?, " the man asked.

"Vous pouvez me tutoyer, si vous voulez moldus, " she responded, which roughly means "don't speak to me like you know me, muggle, " but loses something in the translation. She was here because the boss of his boss's colleague told the biggest boss that she was essential. French muggles love the pecking order, but Sagacia didn't fit in that order. She was just, _une specialiste_. Perhaps he wanted to establish himself as her equal with hopes of being her superior, which almost made her throw up a little in the back of her throat.

Captain Jean Duprix didn't bat an eyelash at the response, he only smiled genially. To him, she must have appeared to be little more than a feisty woman with a chip on her shoulder. She was probably some femen academic type with a degree in psychology who spent her time obsessing over serial killers and listening to jazz records; or so he _might_ have said to himself. She looked the type. Short and thin with straight black hair and dark eye makeup. At 44kg on a 1.5m frame, Sagacia did not have what one would call an imposing presence. Unless you were a witch or wizard, then you knew who she was, and you wanted to be somewhere else.

Sagacia eyed Jean Duprix for a moment. He was the normal muggle military type, he had probably played rugby as a youth, but had let himself go and was a bit soft around the middle. Married. For longer than ten years and probably had a child, no definitely a child. His wife was blond, pretty, but they were growing apart. Sagacia ticked off all the facts in her head. His build said sports, not football, so rugby. His ring finger had a deep depression from wearing a tight wedding band, but he had taken it off. And his tie was too well coordinated. The rest was fairly easy to figure out. She smelled two perfumes on him, one was cheap, his wife, the other expensive, his mistress.

Sagacia slipped into his mind with legillimancy to confirm her read. She liked to do it the old fashioned way, to stay sharp. Wife and kid, check. Mistress, check. But no blond.

"Merde," she said aloud, as she walked toward the crime scene. It was just like the previous one, five bodies, all girls under the age of seventeen, arranged in a pentagram, each body posed within its large points. The Gendarmes thought it was Satanists. Renault was convinced it had something to do with the wizarding world. No matter how many times he had been told that pentagrams were meaningless to wizards, (something cooked up by wannabe muggles), he still begged. Apolline begged. Fleur asked. She couldn't say no to Fleur or Gabrielle, or at least she didn't want to. She spoiled her god-daughters rotten.

The victims were pretty, mostly blonds and brunettes. A few dye jobs, petite. Each had been garroted from behind. The killer was most probably male, average height and strength. He left few traces. There were no traces of semen, or saliva, and all of them had were _pucelles_. Each one had been put in a freezer, for at least a month in some instances.

Sagacia took out her wand, 30cm Brazillian Rosewood with a Thestral hair core, and bent down over one of the girls, with her left hand she forced open one of the victims' left eye and touched the wand tip gently to the cornea. "**Theiza mou te stigme**," she whispered. Nothing happened.

"Odd," she said.

"What is?" asked Duprix.

Sagacia walked to the next, but it was the same. Nothing. None of them would show what they had seen the moment of their deaths. The last group had. They had seen a wall, a dark wall and light shining through it. The walls were wooden, like those you'd find in a shack, and the light seemed to move as if from the headlights of a moving car.

Sagacia paced around the bodies for several minutes, slapping the tip of her wand against her forehead, her eyes closed.

"We could have sent a car to pick you up," said Duprix, still more familiar than she liked.

"I hate the rain, and the cold," she said. "But this is wrong, it's all wrong. Who found the bodies?"

"Janitor, about 2 hours ago, we've kept him in that room across the hall," said Duprix gesturing with his head, his hands reaching for a small pad.

"Jacques Compostelle, forty-seven years old, widowed, no children. He's worked here for three years, clean record," he finished.

"Has anyone but you talked to him?" Sagacia asked.

"Not that I am aware of. The responding officer, gendarme Franc Louis. But he's the sensible sort. Rang it up straight away and secured the area," he said. "We've been waiting for another one since Paris."

"Get on your knees," she said.

Duprix looked around for a second, "excuse me?" he said.

Sagacia flicked her wand and his knees buckled as she approached him, her wand pointing at his face.

"**Legilimens**," she said and entered his mind.

All the details were there, the testimony of Compostelle, Louis' report. The old man seemed shaken, tearful, but not guilty.

Sagacia leaned in closer. "The girls?"

His thoughts flipped through her mind like a slide show. Two local, the rest unknown, possibly not even French like the last group which had two Spanish and one Bulgarian. Pictures sent out for ID, could take days or weeks. Sagacia eased back out.

"What are you doing, " Duprix asked, "and why am I on my knees?"

"You're about what, 1.90m, I'm too short to look you in the eye, " she said. "I need to go."

Sagacia stormed off towards the exit, and Duprix chased after her.

"Don't you want to see Compostelle?" he asked.

"No," she replied as she pushed out the door.

"At least let me give you a ride; it's still storming," he pleaded.

"I hate the rain, and the cold, " she repeated.

"Then don't go out in it. Come on, I'll give you a ride back to the station. The Commandant wants to speak with you anyway, then I can drop you off anywhere you want, " he offered.

"I need the will, " she replied taking another look out at the storm. It was just as bad as it had been when she had left the Cafe des Artistes, "and I am not ready to speak with him. I left my coffee at the café half finished. I don't like leaving things half finished."

With a whirl she was out the door and gone into the rain.

"She's mad, " said Duprix shaking his head, "stark raving _mad_."

* * *

Her cup was still there on the table of the booth furthest from the door. No one touched her cup. Phillipe wouldn't dare. Once he had left the cup there for an entire week, and just put a big bowl over it to keep the smell down. No one sat in the booth. Sagacia had cursed it years before. Phillipe had secretly tried to get it uncursed, but to no avail. Half the wizards in France wouldn't do it because they didn't want to cross Sagacia, the other half didn't because they couldn't. Sagacia's curses tended to stick, and she was the only one who could undue them.

She sat down and sipped the café élongé with cream and sugar. It was ice cold. Sagacia was a compulsive. Not in the usual way, mind you, she didn't fear stepping on cracks, and didn't count stairs, but she had little quirks, like finishing things. She couldn't leave something undone. Shoelaces or buttons, food, drinks, and work, all of them had to be finished in good order. She was obsessed with order, equality, symmetry.

"It's all wrong, " she said aloud to no one in particular.

It was all wrong. They couldn't have seen _nothing_, that's not possible, even the black of a hood would have been something. This changed everything. It was a message. The message screamed loud and clear.

"I know about you. And I know what you can do."

But there was something even more to the message.

It said, "I am stronger than you."

It's possible to block the spell in two ways. Both require powerful magic. The first way is simply by removing the person's mind before killing them. No mind, no memory. The second way is to suck the memories out, which is powerful Animancy.

"Two ways, " she said, "two ways."

Sagacia started to rock back and forth, faster and faster.

"Only two ways," she repeated.

She stopped.

"Three ways. I don't like three," she said shaking her head as she started rocking back and forth again. "No, three is always bad. Three times two is six, six is even. Six times two is twelve, twelve is even. Twelve times two is twenty-four, twenty-four is even. Two is even and four is even. I like twenty-four. But three times eight is twenty-four. I don't like three."

Suddenly she stopped rocking.

The storm was breaking, the sun muscled its way through the clouds. Sagacia liked the sun even less than she liked the rain. She began to fold in on herself, and with a pop, she disappeared and a two euro piece clanked onto the table. The price of a coffee was 1.30. She hated 1, and she hated 3. She always paid in increments of 2, 4, 6, or 8.

Eight is a perfect number. Like infinity.


	2. Eighty-six thousand, four hundred

The walls were earth and rock. They suffocated her.

At night the oppressive blackness and the silence eats away at the soul of a person, and each morning, if you knew it was morning, you might find your mind farther and farther away. But after a few days you slipped into a sort of timelessness, perhaps weeks or months went by from one moment to the next, and you had no way of knowing, no point of reference.

No sunrise, no ticking clock.

The only routine was that of the guard, Burt. Sometimes he brought his friend, Frankie. Burt and Frankie would laugh and joke, and take their turns.

Every 86,400 seconds, and she counted each one, Burt would bring her food and she would sit and eat. He would set down a bucket of water and a rag, and she would bathe. He would watch, silently. She didn't have a toilet, that purpose was served by another bucket. He would fastidiously empty it every week day, except on weekends, when no one came at all.

He would say nice things to her, calming things. That it was okay, that it was almost over, that she would get out tomorrow.

"Call's just come in, 33, you're out tomorrow so this is the last time I'll get to see you," he'd said as he unbuckled his belt. Every day was the last time. Then he would do anything he wanted.

"I read about something new today," he'd say, "thought we'd try it out. You want to try it out with me, don't you, 33?"

Frankie was different, he didn't like mind games. Just pain.

"Don't do that Frankie," Burt said.

"Ah, it's just a little mark, so she'll remember me," said Frankie brandishing a small pocket knife, the cheap imitation Swiss Army type.

"Alright, but not too deep," said Burt.

33 remembered Frankie. He left behind 21 memories. Some memories were deeper, longer. Some of the memories were short and twisted around.

33 clawed at the pendant embedded in her chest. She could feel the wires penetrating into her. She tried to pull it out, she wanted to be rid of it. It was her shackle, her chain, if only she could pull it out. But the pain was too great, the more she pulled it, the more it felt like she was dying.

* * *

The girl stood at the window, her flowing black robes rippled as if soft air were flowing from underneath them. Her long black hair had been wrapped up in tall ornate topknot. Her slender frame stood like a statue before the grand window looking out onto a vast garden, filled with statues and strange plants and trees. The trees would sometimes move, to bat at a bird flying to close, or to twist another side around to face the bright midday sun.

Sometimes the statues would change position, or take a break and sit down on a small stool. The room was small and cozy with a writing desk and large paintings covering the wall. Stained wooden crown molding separated the cream colored walls. In the middle of the room lay a large Persian rug, and on it, two hand carved sitting chairs separated by a small table. A servant, dressed in a royal blue coat with tails was gently setting a tea tray on it.

Another servant opened the double doors to the room and a tall broad shouldered man with a copious mustache and foppish hairdo sashed into the room, stooping into a low bow.

"Bonjour, votre altesse," said the man, still bowed obsequiously.

"Guten Tag, Herzog Grindelwald," replied the girl, turning gracefully.

"You do me great honor, Your Majesty, to speak to me in my native language, " said Grindelwald, bowing once more before standing up straight and walking to the seat now offered by the young woman.

"I regret that my father, the king, cannot meet with you before you return to Bavaria, I trust you will carry our best wishes to Herr Hitler, and our congratulations to him for becoming 'Man of the Year' for Time magazine. I hear it is a great honor among muggles," she said as she floated softly into the seat opposite him.

She offered him tea; he politely declined.

"Of course I will, and I offer the whole of Germany's condolences for the loss of your mother," he said. "We all mourn her loss, though we thank God that her legacy of beauty and grace lives on in you."

"You are most kind, Herzog, and I thank you for your condolences," she said.

There was a moment of silence. She sat still and straight, her eyes dark and piercing. They penetrated right to his core and he became a bit uncomfortable and shifted in his seat.

"As you well know, Your Highness, the Confederacy of Warlocks have blessed our little endeavor, and I wanted to thank the King personally for his invaluable support," he said.

"The King is assured of your ability to manage Herr Hitler and his party, and he looks forward to an era of peace and prosperity," she replied.

The Duke sat for a moment, looking pensive.

"There is, of course, the other matter, which I had hoped to discuss with his majesty before leaving . . ." Grindelwald trailed off.

"I will speak to it on his behalf," she said.

"If I am to find what is sought, I will require some additional resources which I fear only the King himself can provide," he said. "As you know, Herr Dulles is in pursuit as well, if this should fall into the hands of a muggle, well it would be disastrous for our kind."

"The King will honor any request pursuant to our mutual goals. You may address him in letter should the need arise; this is assured on our behalf," she said.

Grindelwald bowed his head politely.

"Thank you, Your Highness, and please extend our condolences to his majesty at the proper time along with our most gracious thanks."

The princess bowed her head slightly and stood up.

"Your visit and your condolences have been most appreciated, Herzog, but I am sure you must be pressed for time. I bid you fond farewell and will attend you with pleasure on our next meeting."

Grindelwald stood up and bowed deeply and backed slowly to the door. It opened behind him and he turned and left.

"I wish to be alone," she said to the servant. "I shall lock the door and I am not to be disturbed for any reason for one hour."

The servant bowed and closed the doors as he left.

The girl took a small piece of chalk out of the writing desk drawer across the room from where she was sitting and a large folded piece of parchment that had been dyed black. She set it on the carpet in the center of the room, unfolding it many times and smoothing it flat. She took the chalk and held it in front of her.

Taking out a short wand with a silver engraved handle, she drew the tip lightly up the chalk, again, and again, mumbling under her breath. She then drew a wide circle on the parchment and walked back to the window. She stared out at the garden. She waited, motionless, as if frozen in time for nearly twenty minutes. Until 'pop', a man arrived in the middle of the circle holding a small handkerchief.

He was tall and clean shaven, a bit lanky with a bright youthful face and kind blue eyes. He seemed, by all appearances, to be a bit of a dandy with his pressed suit and coordinated cravat. He had sky blue robes that glistened ever so slightly.

"Ah, Mr. Dumbledore," said the girl.

"Your Majesty," said Dumbledore, bowing politely." I apologize for the tardiness, my time these days is less and less my own."

The girl offered him a seat and he took it, smiling brightly as she fell back into her seat, massaging her temples.

"You are troubled, Princess?" he asked.

"I just met with that pompous and foul man, Grindelwald," she said.

Dumbledore made a sharp intake of breath and leaned back in the chair, interlocking his fingers.

"I take it the Confederacy of Warlocks has agreed to his plans," Dumbledore surmised.

"The King has convinced them. He's a doddering fool and barely more than a squib. So long as my mother was alive he was under control, but now he begins to think he can actually make decisions himself," she said, shaking her head.

"Grindelwald has convinced him it can be found, and that he would turn it over to him," she said. "As if he would."

"Do you believe it can be found?" asked Dumbledore.

"Yes, there are many things in this world of tremendous power. Why not that?" she said.

Dumbledore sat back for a moment and thought. The princess watched him studiously. After a moment she shook her head and leaned forward.

"I will not mince words with you, Albus," she said using his first name. "I have asked you here for a purpose which neither of us will like."

"I suspected as much," Dumbledore said. "But I must wonder, how do you know that you can trust me?"

"I don't," she said, "which is why I must ask you to make the Unbreakable Vow."

Dumbledore took a deep breath through his nose and exhaled loudly.

"I cannot promise to do a thing without first knowing what it is. I hope you understand, Your Majesty."

"I do. I do not ask you to vow to do a thing, only to vow never to reveal what I tell you, what I ask you, or anything to do with this meeting," she said.

"That I can do," he said and offered his hand to her, taking out his wand. "I, Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, do vow before her royal majesty, Persephone Margot Sabine, umm . . ."

"Susan," she said.

"Ah, yes, Susan d'Orleans that I shall not reveal, under any circumstances and for any reason, the content or fact of our encounter today," he finished.

An energetic red flame ejected from the tip of his wand and encircled their hands.

It was done.

"Satisfied?" he asked.

"That will do, yes," she replied. "I am prepared to put all my resources at your disposal for a not so simple task. I want you to kill Duke Grindelwald."


End file.
